July 17, 2006

A night at the proms...

This past Saturday i went to 'Last night at the Proms' at a place called Stanstead House. Its an annual ritual actually! Its a classical music concert, with a full orchestra and usually they have performers - as in opera singers.

This is the beautiful Stanstead House, set in acres and acres of woodland and fields! Certainly the front 'lawn' is able to host a lawn concert with full orchestra and hundreds of people in the audience (though probably more like thousands!). I've never actually been inside the house yet..keep meaning to. Next house i buy will definitley be like this one :) i wish!!

The orchestra, conductor and this year instead of having the usual tenor and soprano they had a group called 'G4'. Ordinarily i would have been ok with this. G4 are classically trained singers, who do opera, and opera with a modern twist, or modern songs with an operatic twist. They were the losers on pop idol, or one of those type of programmes..you know..the ones where the winners disappear altogether and the 'losers' end up doing really well! G4 come into the latter category! They are actually very good...BUT there wa one massive downside...the groupies. The idea of this concert is that you bring along a picnic and have a relaxing evening listening to music. What actually happened is several hundred people came from the back, and stood directly infront of those of us who had been there since 4.30pm to get a good spot, and so we couldn't see a thing. We all thought we had these people beat, because in the interval we all moved up to such an extent that we were all very cosy with the people around us (usually there is a spacious gap in between everyone. But no matter how many times we moved, they seemed to find a gap to stand in. It was really frustrating, and for me really spoiled the concert.

There is lots of flag waving, and the 'real' last night of the proms takes place in the Albert Hall in London in about September time i think. The proms is a series of classical music concert held in the Albert Hall, and the last one is always very celebrated, with very patriotic music such as 'Rule Britania' and 'Land of Hope and glory'. I'll probably never get to go to the real thing, because its almost impossible to get a ticket.